After months of fanfare and anticipation, gigabit home Internet service Google Fiber finally went live on Tuesday in Kansas City. The search giant is offering 1Gbps speeds for just $70 per month—significantly faster and cheaper than what any traditional American ISPs are offering.

"We just got it today and I’ve been stuck in front of my laptop for the last few hours," Mike Demarais, founder of Threedee, told Ars. "It’s unbelievable. I’m probably not going to leave the house."

He lives in a four-bedroom house run by "Homes For Hackers" on Kansas City’s Hanover Heights neighborhood, just on the state border with Missouri. The house has become one of the hubs for the KC Startup Village, an informal group of entrepreneurs who have clustered around homes immediately eligible for Google Fiber.

Meanwhile, Demarais said that on an Ethernet connection, he’s seen consistent Google Fiber speeds of 600 to 700Mbps, with Wi-Fi topping out around 200Mbps. Even at the slower wireless speeds, that’s more than an order of magnitude faster than what most Americans have at home.

"The first thing I did was BitTorrent Ubuntu," he said. "I think that took two minutes, let me try it again right now."

Prior to Tuesday, Demarais—one of the house’s first two residents—said he’d been working out of local McDonald’s and Panera locations for their free Wi-Fi.

Enlarge/ This is 4428 State Line Ave., the "Homes for Hackers" headquarters.

Mi Wi-Fi es tu Wi-Fi

The Homes For Hackers, founded by local Web developer Ben Barreth, had originally been conceived as a matchmaking scheme between entrepreneurs who wanted a free place to live and work, and local families who would open their homes to them. (Ars covered that effort back in August.)

But once Google announced its fiber rollout schedule, Barreth realized the families that had signed up were not going to get crazy speeds until Summer 2013. So he took matters into his own hands and, with his wife’s blessing, he liquidated his Roth IRA to put 20 percent down on a house they eventually bought for $48,000 in September 2012.

The couple has no plans to profit from the house. Instead, they want to use it as a way to nurture Kansas City’s nascent tech community. He’s letting entrepreneurs like Demarais live in the house rent-free and utilities-free for three months—they just have to pay for their own groceries.

"We’re strong, devout Christians," Barreth told Ars. "I’ve been pushing on doors and a lot of doors have opened for me. I feel like this is what I’m supposed to do right now. It doesn't make a lot of financial sense but I really think it will benefit Kansas City. The whole reason why [we bought the house] was that no one in Kansas City was really exploiting fiber like we could be and this is the way I can bring in individuals that will exploit it. It helps that it’s not a really expensive house. [My wife] is a stay-at-home mom with two kids too, so we’re living off my one salary, and it’s still a strain. It’s a still a big strain."

He anticipates getting donations, sponsorships, or, the most-likely scenario, renting out one of the bedrooms via AirBnB to the first Google Fiber "tourists"—people who might want to come for a day or two at a time to try it out.

"$50 a night for 10 nights a month would cover mortgage and most of the utilities," he said.

Barreth has been so busy dealing with local media requests that he hasn’t yet had a chance to use the connection himself—he and his family live about 20 minutes away from the second house, and their neighborhood was not included in the first rollout regions.

Kansas City, setting itself apart

Demarais said he knew he’s been spoiled: "Wherever I go after this, my Internet speed is going to be ruined."

His company, Threedee, hopes to provide an added benefit to the growing 3D printing ecosystem.

"We’re building a front-end dev toolkit that lets developers view and manipulate 3D models in a browser," he said. "We have an API that lets you communicate those models directly to 3D printers entirely in javascript without need to convert to a 3D model. We want to shake up manufacturing with tools that will allow people to buy products made for them."

Demarais moved to Kansas City from Boston to work on his new startup—and while the move was driven in part by Google Fiber, being able to live rent-free for 90 days was huge. He had considered staying home in Boston or moving to San Francisco, but both cities are notoriously expensive.

"I don’t want to raise capital yet and it’s hard to do that if I would need to get a part-time job just to pay rent," he added. "All of that stuff is taken care for me, that was the big thing. People are too quick to discredit the value of a free-rent environment with like-minded people. KC needs to separate itself from the other scenes. Why here? Fiber is not enough. I think you need to have a dense startup community, and if young people are not moving here and trying to start startups, you need to artificially create that flow."

155 Reader Comments

All the neighborhoods getting fiber in the initial go around have at least a season/year assigned. I assume you're in one of the areas they'll be expanding to after this roll-out is done. So probably 2014 sometime.

This is a beta program. Most cities wouldn't pay out the nose for the infrastructure KC paid for this setup. Verizon has to pay for all the right of ways, switch rooms, switching hardware, everything. About the only thing Google paid for was laying the fiber.

Let's see it cost $70/mo then.

For me, I'm happy being a lowly Charter customer at 50M down / 10M up.

A major point that no one mentioned is that it is one thing to get high speeds on unloaded systems, but is much more difficult to do so on systems under heavy loads. So it is quite possible these speeds will fall dramatically as a lot more people sign up.

What's with all the Christianity bashing? It's not important to the rest of the world but it's an important drive that led him to the decision to give without expecting anything in return.

It's such a huge surprise considering that 'charity' is considered a virtue under Christian morality. A lot of bad things happen in the name of the religion but it's not all xenophobia, evangelism, and fundamentalism. Beneath all of the cruft people and the church have piled on throughout history there is a strong moral foundation.

It begs the question, were you raised in a state of such moral disparity that it's impossible to accept that another person could be capable of giving selflessly?

I find that hard to believe, I think it's more likely that these people bashing the guy because of his religion are just consumed by their own self-serving vanity. Get over yourselves.

Forget Hobbes, there are people in the world capable of giving selflessly regardless of your personal drives.

BTW, I'm not a Christian or 'religious'. I'm just disappointed in hostile atheists who feel the need to constantly vindicate their personal beliefs at the expense of others. We don't care, if you're adding nothing of value to the conversation then you're just another hostile idiot who likes to talk loud.

Standard customization integrates your logo, color scheme, fonts and other brand elements to give a cohesive look on any web site. Default dimensions are 640x400, but the interface can be scaled to any proportional size.

This is a beta program. Most cities wouldn't pay out the nose for the infrastructure KC paid for this setup. V.

If they get an ROI it doesnt matter. Its a public/private partnership, hardly anything new. Many many cities do this with lots of projects like arenas and other civic infrastructure. KCMO did it for a new arena and its now a top grossing arena. Huge success.

While the 2 KCs gave away many concessions, actual dollar investment in this is very small compared to other civic projects, not impacting credit rating. Google obviously invested a great deal. Google is the one taking the risk here and they can afford it.

Jesus, you could open your own data center with two of these connections! I'd start a $1/month VPN service...

Also, to all you people complaining about the "i'm a good Christian remark", the 'anti-religion thing' is just as bad, if not worse, than the 'religion-fundamentalist thing' that everyone seems to think dominates a huge part of this country. Y'all are mirror images of each other. There's nothing wrong with being proud of your faith, whether it's based on science or in spirituality.

What's the difference between a religious fundamentalist and technocratic fundamentalist?

They're offering $89/month triple play for 12 months, free HBO/Showtime/Starz for 3 months, a $500 Best Buy gift card, and a 4GB Xbox if you'll sign up a two contract. You can smell the desperation. It's fantastic.

I have lived in the KC area most of my life. When I drive south east of it, it seems quite a bit different to me along that dimension. I have never really considered KC as part of the bible belt, nor has it much come up in conversation as long as I have lived in the area. WBC on the other hand is a whole other plane of existence.

Amid the debate about whether this guy used Christianity for "sound financial planning" or not...we've missed the most important parts of the article.

$48,000 for a decent house? Holy crap, that wouldn't get me a 30% down payment on a two bedroom slum where I live, and I am unfortunately left with only Comcrap as my internet provider for a whopping 15/3 Mbps (in practice on a good day) connection for $50+ per month.

I'll be off trying to figure out some reasons why I'm not quitting my job, cashing out my retirement savings, and buying a house outright with cash, in Kansas City...

Do it man you wont regret it.

I have been to all the coastal major cities. They're awesome, don't get me wrong, but I would never want to live in any of those cities. I live in Tulsa OK. It isn't a huge city but it isn't the country either, we get to enjoy all the things people on the coasts do, plenty of culture and counterculture, mainstream people and weirdos alike. It's just there isn't a fuckton of people around so you can actually get around the city quickly, or start a business real cheap and be renowned if you do something unique in the city. Houses and rent is dirt cheap here, theres just as much fun to be had here as you can anywhere else. Kansas City will be no different.

I would say the only downfall would be finding tech related jobs in any sort of abundance, but this is the kind of area where if you want something you start it yourself. For example it makes all the sense in the world for the midwest to house most of the countries datacenters, as sandy has proven coastal cities are more prone to natural disaster.

I have lived in the KC area most of my life. When I drive south east of it, it seems quite a bit different to me along that dimension. I have never really considered KC as part of the bible belt, nor has it much come up in conversation as long as I have lived in the area. WBC on the other hand is a whole other plane of existence.

I spend a lot of time in NYC and am surprised how religious people are, more apparent than in KC. The US seems to be getting more in your face with religion compared to Europe. We are becoming more polarized on many levels.

I would say the only downfall would be finding tech related jobs in any sort of abundance, but this is the kind of area where if you want something you start it yourself. For example it makes all the sense in the world for the midwest to house most of the countries datacenters, as sandy has proven coastal cities are more prone to natural disaster.

This is a beta program. Most cities wouldn't pay out the nose for the infrastructure KC paid for this setup. Verizon has to pay for all the right of ways, switch rooms, switching hardware, everything. About the only thing Google paid for was laying the fiber.

Let's see it cost $70/mo then.

For me, I'm happy being a lowly Charter customer at 50M down / 10M up.

Verizon doesn't offer FiOS in Kansas City so they haven't had to pay for anything. However both Time Warner and AT&T (for Uverse) are negotiating for the same deal with the cities that Google got. I thought they'd been successful at it, but I can only find articles that they're working on the deals still.

Something tells me that Mike Demarais hasn't left his house in years anyway.

Sad really. Just remember people..no one has ever, or WILL ever, say on their deathbed..."I really wish I hadn't spent so much time outdoors and socializing and instead spent MORE time on the internet when I was alive."

Also...let's see just how many people give a damn about those speeds. The VAST majority of people (including 100% of people with a life who don't waste their existence on the internet) will rather pay $50 for slower speeds.

"We’re strong, devout Christians," Barreth told Ars. "I’ve been pushing on doors and a lot of doors have opened for me. I feel like this is what I’m supposed to do right now."

I could describe myself as a "strong, devout Christian"; but except where people go searching for this information, I usually leave it up to others to decide whether I really am a "strong, devout Christian". If a person is such, then it should be obvious before long from their behaviour. We generally feel it's most appropriate to demonstrate Christianity by behaviour, and then pertinently answer people's sincere questions. Which is perhaps what these people have done (I don't know what question they were asked before saying this). Jesus himself said,"By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." Our Christianity is a thread that runs through everything else, and not generally a separate matter for discussion unless someone asks.

As a devout Christian, and as a businessman with some knowledge of American culture (including the business culture of some religious Americans); my initial gut instinct here is to feel that the Barreths are trying to drum up business by advertising both their Christianity and their poverty — thereby appealing to other Christians to consider visiting their property and renting a room. But I could be wrong. It might be uncharitable of me to react this way.I would also ask myself, if I was in Barreth's position (trying the goodness of God), whether I could afterward ascribe my success to miraculous intervention (and not the "mere" compassion of other Christians) if I'm publicising my religion in this way. The advertisement of their religion fundamentally hobbles their ability to reconcile faith with rationality by experience, or, to experience the inherently personal & private confirmatory effect of miracles!It's a slight shame they're not emphasising the viability of their business model, since America generally has such awful broadband that Google's offering in KC is really attractive (the other point of the article). By pre-ascribing so much of their success or failure to their Christianity, Ben Barreth hobbles his ability to tell us anything useful about business, markets or economics.

So I'm backing the people who feel this is irrelevant (personally, I would just have said "I feel like this is what I’m supposed to do right now.", which could be taken as a euphemism for something bigger by other Christians if they want.) But I'm also backing the people who defend these people's right to wear their religion like a big badge publicly on their chests, if they want to... (Imagine the outcry and finger-pointing if the Ars Technica editors had "suppressed" that part of the quote! There would have been justifiable indignation...)

EDIT: My comment appears to have been down-voted by mikedemarais — please correct me if I am wrong...

I've got 250 megabit bidirectional service here, and it's so stupid fast I don't even know what to do with it. Once upon a time, I would have run game servers, but all the game companies have locked everything down so you can't do that anymore, trying to extract a few extra bucks out of the market. When I had games I could host, I had no bandwidth, and now that I have bandwidth, I have no games. SO frustrating.

Gigabit would be nice, I suppose, but that would be $300/mo, and even as nerdy and tech-focused as I am, I'm actually considering dropping back to 100Mbit service from 250, to drop the bill from $140/mo to $70.

I have a question about this startup that maybe someone can answer for me.

Quote:

We have an API that lets you communicate those models directly to 3D printers entirely in javascript without need to convert to a 3D model.

First of all, this would imply, i think, that you're using his 3D printer since it would require some special firmware. This is essentially a walled garden unless people adopt this as a standard. Which, while possible, doesn't seem likely because of my next point.

Unless I'm missing something there is little difference between sending the printer a command in JS or in the form of a 3D model that it should print. Besides printing something, what other commands are you going to issue to the printer? This software just moves the act of creating the 3D model from the PC to the printer. If you need to "customize" something through a browser then why not just have the JS create a customized model in some open source format that's already adopted and send that to the printer? This seems like a nasty case of that one xkcd comic

edit: Sweet jesus this became a flame war quickly.

Hey infernalis,

Right now we are focused on building the most intuitive and efficient 3D modeling and manipulation interface for the web browser. Our software is going to interface with custom 3D Printers, CNC Machines and Laser Cutters that we are building in house, meaning the user will not need to have access to the 3D render file itself. We do plan, however, on allowing the user to download the 3D model in a wide range of file formats, at some point, for a small fee. We have not worked out our entire business model just yet as we are focused on building the best software possible and utilizing the resources currently available to us (free room/board, mentorship).

Something tells me that Mike Demarais hasn't left his house in years anyway.

Sad really. Just remember people..no one has ever, or WILL ever, say on their deathbed..."I really wish I hadn't spent so much time outdoors and socializing and instead spent MORE time on the internet when I was alive."

That is awesome Mike. BTW, is Kauffman Foundation helping out in any way.

kauffman is helping get me connected with everyone in the city. i have only been here for 3 weeks but know a sizable chunk of the people in the startup scene out here. they are also helping organize the kc startup village, a startup community in the fiberhood. http://www.kcstartupvillage.org/

I suppose you're purposely excluding non-traditional American ISP's like Sonic.net? Did you read the other article you guys wrote a few months back about another American ISP providing 1Gbps for $70/mth without needing a very special agreement with the town beforehand?

That is awesome Mike. BTW, is Kauffman Foundation helping out in any way.

kauffman is helping get me connected with everyone in the city. i have only been here for 3 weeks but know a sizable chunk of the people in the startup scene out here. they are also helping organize the kc startup village, a startup community in the fiberhood. http://www.kcstartupvillage.org/

That is great. I am working on a patent and am hoping to get some help from them to execute. They are an entrepreneurs dream if you can get their attention. Congrats. Sounds like your move to KC is paying off.